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Personal Backup Scripting Example

I’m using Personal Backup by Dr. Rathlev as my backup tool. It’s name is a bit misleading, because you could think that it is only allowed to use it as a private person. But no – its current license says it may be used also by any club, organization or even private companys for free.

It is easy to create backup tasks with Personal Backup. But a backup task does not run automatically. And I have to say, it is not easy to create backups that run automatically with this program. The UI of the part of the program which deals with creating automatically running backup tasks is near incomprehensible – even when you read the docs.

What compensates this deficit is that Personal Backup has a perfect command line interface with a good docmentation. So it is very well suited for being scripted.

I control my backups with some tclkit scripts. As you might know, I do use tclkit for many tasks.

The script below creates a full backup in every uneven month (Jan, Mar, May, …) and in between it creates an incremental backup daily. It needs a fitting Personal Backup task file Backup-Task-All.buj.

Copy the contained Backup-Task-All.buj to the folder %USERPROFILE%/*user*/Documents/PersBackup.

Import the Backup Daten.xml into the Windows Task Planner.

The directory structure of the created backups looks like this:

G:/Backup/2014/BD01F # A full backup created on March 1st in 2014
G:/Backup/2014/BD22I # An incremental backup created on March 22nd
.....
G:/Backup/2014/BD21I # An incremental backup from September 21st